Bio/CV

Michael Zapruder is an award-winning composer, recording songwriter, and performer. He holds a Masters degree in music composition from California State University, East Bay, where he was awarded the 2014 Glenn Glasow Fellowship for excellence in composition. His portfolio of instrumental compositions includes works for solo instruments, voice and accompaniment, mixed chamber ensembles, wind ensemble, and electronic media.

Zapruder’s substantial discography of original songs includes Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope, which won the 2009 Independent Music Award for Best Songwriter Album; and Pink Thunder, an album of songs made from poems by living American poets, which was selected by the Boston Globe as the Best Poetry Book of 2012 and called “a work of extraordinary merit and historical significance” by the Huffington Post.

As a performing artist, Zapruder has toured widely, performing at clubs, theaters and at festivals across the US and elsewhere, including invitations to South by Southwest and Pop Montreal. As a recording artist, he has a conceptual side. In 1999, as part of a project he called 52 Songs, Michael wrote, recorded and posted online one song each week for a year. More recently, he released the Pink Thunder songs as an interactive art show, with each song housed in one-of-a-kind music-playing art-objects called portmanteaus. The Pink Thunder in Portmanteaus art show has shown in San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, DC.

As a visiting artist specializing in songs and poetry, he has given craft talks and invited lectures at NYU, University of Wyoming, University of Kentucky, and many other schools.

Michael is a co-founder of the San Francisco arts collective and record label, Howells Transmitter. From 2003-2011, he established and led the curation group for internet radio service Pandora. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two sons, where he is a Kent Kennan Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin’s Butler School of Music.